Millions of dollars
originally intended for smoking cessation programs in Massachusetts have
been diverted to offset budget deficits, leaving the state struggling
to fund quit-smoking hotlines, treatment programs and anti-tobacco
advertising, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting has
found. …

“Roughly 99 percent of all the tobacco dollars that come into the
state are used for something else,” said Stephen Shestakofsky, recently
retired executive director of Tobacco Free Massachusetts, an
anti-tobacco advocacy group. He was referring to the nearly $254 million
in tobacco-related legal awards given to Massachusetts in 2012. More
than $561 million in tobacco taxes was also collected, bringing the
state’s total tobacco tally to just over $815 million, the CDC reports.

On the one hand, it’s not as if
I’d urge the state of Massachusetts to sink vast sums into the
paternalist project of hectoring its citizens to quit, especially not at
a time when its taxpayers are already having to foot a steep tab for
its RomneyCare health insurance experiment. On the other hand, we can
now see that it was the purest pretense for attorneys general in states
like Massachusetts to have portrayed the Great Tobacco Robbery
settlement of some years back as motivated by a supposed need for new
“public health” outlays, as opposed to sheer plunder and the interests of the various lawyers involved.

That’s worth remembering next time you hear a proposal to extract
large sums from the food industry (either through taxation or, as some
in the legal profession would like, by suing them for it under some
creative theory) with the promise that funds will then be earmarked for
anti-obesity efforts. In practice, after voters’ attention wanders,
funds ordinarily get earmarked for the advancement of the political
interests of those in power.